James Phillips's latest exploration of love and politics doesn't quite live up
to expectations

Did I go a bit overboard about James Phillips? His debut as a playwright – with The Rubenstein Kiss at Hampstead Theatre – struck me as a marvel: ambitious, complex, intelligent. I expected great things of him. But that was eight years ago and he went a bit quiet. So quiet I almost forgot about him. And even tripped along to the Trafalgar Studios the other night without registering that Hidden in the Sand was by the same chap I’d once lauded to the rafters. The surprise of seeing Ronnie Wood slumming it with us downstairs further distracted me from making the connection.

I’m glad I didn’t twig because it meant I approached the first half without high expectations beside the knowledge that this was a play centring on Cyprus and its ongoing partition. And that allowed me to enjoy one of the most touching seduction scenes I’ve ever seen on stage, without feeling glib relief that here was a case of youthful promise confirmed.

At the start, Jonathan, a middle-aged English classical scholar, shyly stands next to Alexandra, a Greek Cypriot refugee living in London and running a jewellery store. They’re in her flat at night. He asks to touch her. Exquisitely played by Scott Handy, an actor blessed with haunted eyes and intense watchability, this model of erudite reserve mutters unheroic apologies: “I don’t remember how this is done.” Recently abandoned by his wife, his loneliness is almost unbearable. When Sally Dexter’s captivating Alexandra allows him to cross the borderline into intimacy, at once impishly forthright, kindly and tentative herself, you want to cheer. Wine is drunk, clothes are shed, Neil Diamond is played on an old gramophone. It’s very charming.

What follows doesn’t quite live up to this. Alexandra is full of secrets, riddled with conflicts – has defined herself, in ways we slowly appreciate, by the 1974 Turkish invasion. As with The Rubenstein Kiss, Phillips – who also directs – marries personal relations with broad political concerns. The idea of living in the past, and living a lie too, feels pertinent to the island’s current status, but some individual details ring false. Daphne Alexander also struggles to lend depth to the ancillary role of a young war photographer who has just been in Kosovo (this takes place in the Nineties, we glean). The evening holds our attention throughout but its journey feels incomplete. Has Phillips more to learn? Yes. But that early sighting of talent in him was no mirage.